Pharmaceutical medications increase the lives and the quality of lives of millions of people. Moreover, as the general population ages and new beneficial drugs are introduced, prescription order volumes to be filled at pharmacies and distributed to individual customers and through health care providers such as hospitals, convalescent centers, and the like, are expected to double within the next few years. This present and expected increase in order volume places enormous pressure on pharmacists, other pharmacy workers, and health care providers, who strive to fill and distribute each order efficiently, accurately and quickly.
The process of retrieving, filling, and distributing a prescription order to a patient or customer can include many different people and organizations performing numerous tasks. An error with any one of these tasks can lead to the mishandling of a patient's prescription order. Such mishandling of a prescription order often results in a patient not timely receiving their prescription order or receiving a wrong, possibly even deadly, prescription order or the like.
For example, a healthcare facility such as a convalescent center, elder care residential facility, manages care facility, hospital, and the like, must regularly distribute thousands of prescription medications to hundreds of its residents each week. This process usually includes sending the resident's prescription orders to a remote, off-site, pharmacy, then receiving the filled prescription orders back from the pharmacy for distribution. The filled prescription orders are then typically separated and individually identified for each resident. Usually, the separated prescription orders are then placed in a portable cart for distribution.
A worker then moves the portable cart from room to room through the convalescent center or elder care residential facility and distributes each resident's prescription orders to the appropriate resident. The worker also usually maintains a written record of which medications have been administered to which residents.
In order to operate effectively, such distribution systems require workers with acute attention to detail skills, a high degree of competence, and a desire to consistently perform these types of repetitive tasks with great accuracy. Unfortunately, the supply of such workers is often not able to keep up with the demand. Moreover, as economic demands on these types of facilities increase, many such facilities may seek to reduce their costs by hiring less skilled and less costly workers to perform these tasks.
Recently, efforts have been made to reduce the likelihood of a worker accidentally delivering the wrong prescription order to a patient. However, such systems still require the worker to perform some sort of affirmative act, such as pressing a button or operating a scanning device, to update the tracking system with relevant information. Accordingly, since the worker remains critical to the effective operation of the system, human error continues to be a major factor associated with improper distribution of prescription medications.